Here is something to ponder: Silicon Valley will have gotten more work done on its April Fools’ Day jokes tomorrow than Washington has gotten done in the past several years. And that’s scary, for as much as playing PacMan on Google Maps is funny and maybe even endearing, driving on bridges ready to collapse is not. Read More

“Reality TV” is one of those phrases that inevitably begs for scare quotes — with its staged scenes and melodramatic confessions, a reality TV show’s relationship with reality can be … complicated. But Morgan Spurlock, director of documentaries like Super Size Me, suggested that the new online video series Connected might live up to “the promise of… Read More

I’m a fan of all different sorts of rocks. Rock music. Rock gardens. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
But there’s one type of rock that I — and most other drivers, I imagine — hate with a deep, fiery passion: rocks that hit my car’s windshield at 70 mph.
Few things so small can wreck your day so suddenly. Everything is going great. The sun is shining. Hell… Read More

How can more women be encouraged into technology careers? It’s a question that is often put to delegates at tech conferences, but one which continues to be far harder to answer than it is to ask. The problem of gender imbalance in tech is systemic and societal in Western nations. It’s about expectations and aspirations. Read More

The race to provide telecom services to developers of every stripe has a number of large, well-capitalized participants. New and quickly growing among the better-known names is Sinch, a company that was spun out of Rebtel just over 10 months ago. According to the firm, Sinch is now generating revenue at a $60 million run rate.
Sinch started with certain advantages that are worth noting. It… Read More

Amid this steady drumbeat of technology breaches and security snafus, venture capitalists have spent roughly $6.5 billion on new technologies to combat this menace, according to CrunchBase data. The latest company to benefit from this deluge of dollars, and the one that addresses the issue of bad actors inside corporate networks most directly, is HyTrust, which closed on $25 million. Read More

For the first time, children under 13 are allowed to have an official presence on Facebook. They still can’t have a profile, but their parents can now tag photos of them (or pet) to create a “Scrapbook”. This lets parents collect photos of their baby, toddler, or pre-teen in a centralized place they can share with friends or loved ones. Scrapbook will first roll out in the US… Read More

The smartphone to beat this season is the Galaxy S6 Edge. It’s slim, stylish, and powerful, a mashup between the previous Galaxy S series with the original iPod Touch. It’s well-made and unique, a combination rarely found in cellphones these days and it is as far from the Galaxy S5 as the T-1000 was from the original Terminator. In short, it’s pretty cool and probably the only… Read More

Microsoft today announced that it will consolidate its Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate offerings for enterprises into a single product once it launches Visual Studio 2015 later this year. Now called Visual Studio Enterprise With MSDN, this new version will include all of the features developers were getting with Visual Studio Ultimate (IntelliTrace in production, CodeLens support, etc.). Read More

A few weeks ago Google made headlines with the launch of the new Chromebook Pixel, the highest-end Chromebook on the market (and with a price to show for it). Today, the Chrome OS laptop ecosystem is launching two products that are the exact opposite: the Haier Chromebook 11 (now available online at Amazon) and the Hisense Chromebook (now available at Walmart). Both of these 11.6-inch… Read More

We often hear that America is a nation of immigrants, but some members of Congress have forgotten the simple truth – immigration is our country’s single greatest competitive advantage in a growing global economy.
The primary driver of the U.S.’s position as the worldwide leader in innovation and entrepreneurship is due to tireless, talented, hardworking immigrants coming to… Read More

Okay, the bike thing probably isn’t true but Postmates co-founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann will join us on stage at TC Disrupt New York in May.
Almost four years ago, Lehmann stepped onto the TechCrunch Disrupt stage and launched a company called Postmates, with a plan to totally disrupt the courier industry. Read More

Tile, the lost item tracker that you can attach to purses, keys, luggage, bikes or anything else that tends to go missing at times, is today rolling out a new feature designed to make it easier for people to get help finding their items. In an update to the company’s iOS and Android applications, users will now be able to share their Tiles with others, including friends, family… Read More

Data analysis often involves looking at a large set of pretty uniform, well-structured data. But as companies continue to gather more electronic documents in all kinds of forms (and formats), those traditional techniques don’t work anymore. Companies like Palantir and IBM (with Watson) are now making it easier for data scientists and technical users to query unstructured textual… Read More

Tomorrow, ESPN is launching a major redesign to an experience that has basically gone unchanged since its previous redesign in 2009.
The company has rebuilt its web experience: instead of having two different completely units — a mobile version and a desktop version — it’s now a single responsive unit that scales to the size of the device, using the same underlying technology. Read More

Twitter this morning is publicly launching Curator, its new product that lets media organizations, publishers, and broadcasters identify, filter and display tweets and Vine videos on any screen in real-time. The free service, which is something of a competitor to Storify, is designed to help those in the media industry and soon, others too, make better sense of the barrage of data on… Read More

Google is launching an update to Drive for Work and Drive for Education today that introduces a number of new tools for users who need to have greater control over how their data is shared both internally and with external customers. Over the next few weeks, both Google Drive for Work and Google Drive for Education users will get access to these new tool. Read More

Google has created a new Easter Egg for Google Maps (pretty much just in time for actual Easter) which lets you play Pac-Man in real-world locales on the company’s Maps apps for desktop and mobie devices. It’s easy to play, by either navigating to the Google Maps website or opening the app on your Android or iOS device, and then just searching for a location where Pac-Man might… Read More